39 Facts About Gauss

1.

Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss was a German mathematician and physicist who made significant contributions to many fields in mathematics and science.

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2.

Sometimes referred to as the Princeps mathematicorum and "the greatest mathematician since antiquity", Gauss had an exceptional influence in many fields of mathematics and science, and is ranked among history's most influential mathematicians.

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3.

Gauss'smother was illiterate and never recorded the date of his birth, remembering only that he had been born on a Wednesday, eight days before the Feast of the Ascension .

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4.

Gauss later solved this puzzle about his birthdate in the context of finding the date of Easter, deriving methods to compute the date in both past and future years.

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5.

Gauss'sbreakthrough occurred in 1796 when he showed that a regular polygon can be constructed by compass and straightedge if the number of its sides is the product of distinct Fermat primes and a power of 2.

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6.

Gauss was so pleased with this result that he requested that a regular heptadecagon be inscribed on his tombstone.

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7.

Gauss remained mentally active into his old age, even while having gout and suffering general unhappiness.

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8.

In 1840, Gauss published his influential Dioptrische Untersuchungen, in which he gave the first systematic analysis on the formation of images under a paraxial approximation .

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9.

In 1854, Gauss selected the topic for Bernhard Riemann's inaugural lecture "Uber die Hypothesen, welche der Geometrie zu Grunde liegen" .

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10.

On 23 February 1855, Gauss died of a heart attack in Gottingen ; he is interred in the Albani Cemetery there.

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11.

Gauss was nominally a member of the St Albans Evangelical Lutheran church in Gottingen.

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12.

Gauss's God was not a cold and distant figment of metaphysics, nor a distorted caricature of embittered theology.

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13.

Many biographers of Gauss disagree about his religious stance, with Buhler and others considering him a deist with very unorthodox views, while Dunnington points out that he was, at least, a nominal Lutheran.

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14.

Two religious works which Gauss read frequently were Braubach's Seelenlehre and Sussmilch's Gottliche ; he devoted considerable time to the New Testament in the original Greek.

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15.

Gauss believed in an omniscient source of creation however he claimed that belief or a lack of it did not affect his mathematics.

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16.

On 9 October 1805, Gauss married Johanna Osthoff, and had two sons and a daughter with her.

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17.

Gauss plunged into a depression from which he never fully recovered.

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18.

Gauss was never quite the same without his first wife, and just like his father, grew to dominate his children.

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19.

Gauss'smother lived in his house from 1817 until her death in 1839.

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20.

Gauss wanted Eugene to become a lawyer, but Eugene wanted to study languages.

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21.

Scottish-American mathematician and writer Eric Temple Bell said that if Gauss had published all of his discoveries in a timely manner, he would have advanced mathematics by fifty years.

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22.

Gauss usually declined to present the intuition behind his often very elegant proofs—he preferred them to appear "out of thin air" and erased all traces of how he discovered them.

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23.

Gauss supported the monarchy and opposed Napoleon, whom he saw as an outgrowth of revolution.

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24.

Gauss summarized his views on the pursuit of knowledge in a letter to Farkas Bolyai dated 2 September 1808 as follows:.

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25.

Mathematicians including Jean le Rond d'Alembert had produced false proofs before him, and Gauss's dissertation contains a critique of d'Alembert's work.

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26.

Gauss'sattempts clarified the concept of complex numbers considerably along the way.

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27.

Gauss made important contributions to number theory with his 1801 book Disquisitiones Arithmeticae, which, among other things, introduced the triple bar symbol for congruence and used it in a clean presentation of modular arithmetic, contained the first two proofs of the law of quadratic reciprocity, developed the theories of binary and ternary quadratic forms, stated the class number problem for them, and showed that a regular heptadecagon can be constructed with straightedge and compass.

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28.

Gauss's method involved determining a conic section in space, given one focus and the conic's intersection with three given lines and given the time it takes the planet to traverse the arcs determined by these lines .

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29.

Gauss proved the method under the assumption of normally distributed errors .

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30.

The method had been described earlier by Adrien-Marie Legendre in 1805, but Gauss claimed that he had been using it since 1794 or 1795.

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31.

In 1818 Gauss, putting his calculation skills to practical use, carried out a geodetic survey of the Kingdom of Hanover, linking up with previous Danish surveys.

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32.

In 1828, when studying differences in latitude, Gauss first defined a physical approximation for the figure of the Earth as the surface everywhere perpendicular to the direction of gravity, later called the geoid.

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33.

Gauss claimed to have discovered the possibility of non-Euclidean geometries but never published it.

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34.

Geodetic survey of Hanover, which required Gauss to spend summers traveling on horseback for a decade, fueled Gauss's interest in differential geometry and topology, fields of mathematics dealing with curves and surfaces.

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35.

Gauss was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1822.

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36.

In 1831, Gauss developed a fruitful collaboration with the physics professor Wilhelm Weber, leading to new knowledge in magnetism and the discovery of Kirchhoff's circuit laws in electricity.

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37.

Gauss ordered a magnetic observatory to be built in the garden of the observatory, and with Weber founded the "Magnetischer Verein", which supported measurements of Earth's magnetic field in many regions of the world.

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38.

Gauss says more than once that, for brevity, he gives only the synthesis, and suppresses the analysis of his propositions.

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39.

The young Gauss reputedly produced the correct answer within seconds, to the astonishment of his teacher and his assistant Martin Bartels.

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